AMMONS HOUSE

Opening

In November 2011 Latoya Ammons moved into a rented house at 3860 Carolina Street in Gary, Indiana, with her mother Rosa Campbell and her three children: a girl of 12 and two boys of 9 and 7. Within weeks the family said the house was wrong. By April 2012 a doctor, a hospital, the Indiana Department of Child Services, the Gary police and a Catholic priest were all involved, and two professionals had put in writing that they watched a 9-year-old boy walk backward up a wall.

The story stayed local until 25 January 2014, when the Indianapolis Star published Marisa Kwiatkowski's investigation, "The exorcisms of Latoya Ammons", built on DCS and police records and interviews. It went around the world within days.

Timeline

November 2011The family moves into the Carolina Street house.

December 2011Large black flies swarm the enclosed porch in midwinter. Campbell later describes footsteps in the basement, doors creaking open, boot prints on the floor and the shadow of a man pacing the living room.

Early 2012The family says the 12-year-old girl rose off her bed while unconscious, and that the children's eyes bulged and their voices dropped when they were seized. Ammons consults clairvoyants and a church, and sets up an altar in the basement.

19 April 2012Ammons takes the boys to their doctor, Geoffrey Onyeukwu. His notes record "delusions of ghost in home" and "hallucinations". Staff call 911 when the younger boy turns violent, and the children are taken to Methodist Hospital in Gary.

April 2012, at the hospitalDCS family case manager Valerie Washington and registered nurse Willie Lee Walker both say they saw the 9-year-old, holding his grandmother's hand, walk backward up a wall to the ceiling and flip over her to land on his feet. DCS takes emergency custody of all three children.

April 2012Gary police Captain Charles Austin visits the house with officers and a DCS worker, records audio and takes photographs. Father Michael Maginot of St. Stephen, Martyr in Merrillville spends hours with the family and concludes they are being tormented by demons.

June 2012With the approval of the Bishop of Gary, Maginot performs the last of three exorcisms on Ammons, two in English and one in Latin. The family moves to Indianapolis and says the trouble stays behind.

November 2012Ammons completes her DCS case plan and gets her children back.

January 2014The Indianapolis Star publishes. Ghost Adventures host Zak Bagans buys the house for $35,000 the same year.

January 2016Bagans has the house demolished after filming in it. His documentary Demon House is released on 16 March 2018.

August 2024Netflix releases The Deliverance, Lee Daniels' film based on the case.

Key figures

Latoya Ammons and Rosa Campbell are the main witnesses to what happened inside the house. Neither ever withdrew the account.

Valerie Washington and Willie Lee Walker are the professionals behind the case's most famous claim. They gave their statements to DCS, and the Star quoted from the records.

Charles Austin, a 36-year veteran of the Gary police, says he went in expecting a scam to make money. After several visits and interviews he told the Star, "I am a believer."

Father Michael Maginot carried out the exorcisms and became the case's most public believer.

Charles Reed, the landlord, told the Star that no tenant before or after the Ammons family reported anything, and that he thought it was a hoax.

Physical and documentary trail

The record: DCS case records with the statements of Washington and Walker, Dr Onyeukwu's notes, psychological evaluations of the children, Gary police reports, Austin's audio and photographs, and Maginot's own accounts. Very few haunting cases have this much official paperwork.

What the paperwork does not hold is any independent recording of the events themselves. Austin's photographs show shapes that he read as faces and mists, and his audio has a voice he did not hear at the time. I have not found any published independent analysis of either. The house no longer exists.

I am a believer.

Things you might not know

• The church took it seriously. Maginot said his were the first exorcisms ever authorised by the Bishop of the Catholic Diocese of Gary.
• The policeman's car joined in. Austin said his car seat moved by itself, his radio and recorder misbehaved, and the garage door at his own home would not open after his visits.
• The doctor called it delusion first. The family's own GP wrote "delusions of ghost in home" before anyone said the word demon.
• A psychologist blamed the household. One assessment called the younger boy's case "an unfortunate and sad case of a child who has been induced into a delusional system perpetuated by his mother".
• The house was bought to be destroyed. Zak Bagans paid $35,000 for it, filmed inside, and had it torn down.
• Hollywood changed the priest. In The Deliverance, the exorcism becomes a deliverance at home performed by a woman minister.

Competing explanations

A genuine haunting and possession. This reading rests on the number of outside witnesses: a caseworker, a nurse, a police captain and a priest, all describing things they say they saw themselves. Washington and Walker had no stake in the family's story, and both put their names to the wall incident.

A family under strain and children performing for their mother. DCS received a complaint that the children were "performing for their mother" and that she encouraged it, and the psychologists' reports point the same way. The investigator Joe Nickell notes that in the wall incident the boy's grandmother was holding his hand, and that the levitation fits a child throwing herself upward.

A story that grew. The Star's account appeared nearly two years after the events, and the case then passed through television, a documentary and a feature film. Later details may owe more to those retellings than to 2012.

Later life of the case

The Ammons family settled in Indianapolis. Demon House drew both praise and ridicule, and its own claims, including crew members falling ill, have not been independently checked. The Deliverance brought the case to a new audience in 2024.

Finding

The Ammons case has more official witnesses than almost any haunting on record, and two of them, a caseworker and a nurse, put the wall incident in writing within hours. It also has a doctor and psychologists who saw a family in crisis, a landlord who never had a problem before or after, and a key detail, the grandmother's hand, that sceptics say changes what the wall incident shows. The witnesses believed what they saw. The records can't show what it was.

What still will not resolve: what Washington and Walker actually watched in that hospital room in April 2012, and what Austin's photographs and audio show under a proper independent analysis.